Keeping Distance

How isolating after cancer treatment affects my daughter and me

I haul a jug of cold water from the 7-Eleven as we walk back to the hotel. My daughter balances a Clif bar and a chocolate muffin on top of the Amazon box we retrieved from the pick-up locker next to the store. Her mouth is shut and her nose is crinkled. What? I ask. What’s wrong? Why are you so quiet?

She opens her eyes wide in answer to my questions.

Oh right. The smell. She didn’t want it to get in her mouth.

She hasn’t been outside in a couple days. I coax her out today because she wants what is in the Amazon box that Dad had delivered to the nearest locker, and I need her to have some outdoor time. Some movement. When we leave, she says she doesn’t like how she can taste the smell of outside. The many scents of a different city combined with the poor air quality and the fact she has been wrapped up in her bed or perched at a desk for a couple days watching her iPad makes this short walk offensive in unusual ways. Her desire to get away from the smells helps her forget how much she dislikes moving fast, and she trots in her flowered Crocs with a hustle she doesn’t use often.

The Amazon locker door pops open. She tugs the box from the narrow opening. Now let’s go back, she says, opening her mouth only wide enough to push these words out.

Not yet, I say, and ask if she’s ever heard of the slushies at 7-Elevens. This entices her enough to go inside.

The store is small, and my daughter hangs at the end cap with her Amazon box. I know she doesn’t feel well because she isn’t grabbing the family size bags of Skittles and gummy bears as she typically would. Or maybe she is keeping her distance from me and the two giant men at the other end of the aisle. For a 10-year-old whose short-term memory is inconsistent at best, she is very good at remembering important rules.

I worry. We won’t be in here long, I say. She tucks herself closer to the end cap as a woman slides between her and the check-out counter on her way to the door. I pull the biggest water jug from the fridge. She squeezes the box to her chest, slipping a fingernail up and down the packing tape. Don’t you want to see the slushies? I don’t think she can stomach one, but I wanted her to have the option.

I’m cold. Can we go back?

At the street corner, we wait to cross the street. A couple arrives next to us, and my daughter shifts to my other side. People clump just behind me, and she scoots slightly farther away. When the little white figure indicates we can cross, my daughter waits for all of the people to go ahead of us before she follows me across.

When we get to our room, she rushes to her bedroom with the Amazon box.

I’ll know how to work it. It’s just like my other one.

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I was in such a rush to leave the hospital that I didn’t see my daughter’s Apple Pencil (knock-off) hidden in the sheets of her bed. It was white, the sheets were white, the pillow was white, and the plastic that wrapped it was clear. Once my daughter had dressed in clean clothes, she was instructed to be on the other side of the lead barrier and to stay there. No one was to touch or move anything on the contaminated side after she left it.

We were there for a night and most of a couple days. Radiation Safety deemed her to be at a releasable level of radiation emission around 10:00 in the morning, so now she didn’t need to be quite so vigilant about what or who she touched.

Image by javi melia from Pixabay

Can she swallow pills? they called to ask only a week ago. Well yes, fortunately, I thought. I would hope that they’d have figured this out a while ago; if she couldn’t swallow the capsule full of radioactive iodine, then what? I don’t know how they treat younger kids who have thyroid cancer. Those kids who can’t swallow capsules can’t ingest the radiation. Do they just wait and practice swallowing other things until they’re capable of getting this capsule down?

We didn’t take any elevators on our way out of the hospital. She walked well more than the required three feet behind me, and I had to wait every time I turned a corner to be sure she saw me. We waited for a bus in the 95-degree heat, me staring at Google Maps that said our bus was DELAYED every so many minutes, and her shifting away from all the strangers walking past, choreographing her concern for the general public.

On the bus, she sat in the back corner. No one was near her. When we got to our two-bedroom, two-bath room, she declared that she got to choose which room she wanted. She took out one of her many stuffies and explained to me that when this color is up, it means you can knock, but when this color is up, you leave me alone. She closed the door and isolated from me.

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I told everyone the good news that we are confident that this round of radioactive iodine ablation therapy will work. I shared about her hospital stay and how well she is tolerating the cross-country travel and the doctors’ appointments and all the imaging.

But I’m on alert. My eyes could see the scans and my ears could hear how well her treatment has gone, but this is not closure for me. This is the best news we could get from the best doctors who can treat her complicated case, but when she yelled for me at 5:01 this morning saying she was sick, none of that mattered. I recalled the timeline of illness and discomfort she experienced the first time we did this while I swept the blankets off myself and swung around the two corners into her room. She was calm and quiet in the restroom and simply wanted me close. She took care of herself and tucked herself back into bed. I’m better now. I haven’t felt good all night, but I think I’m fine now.

After running through my symptoms checklist and getting all Nos from her, I asked her if I could go back to sleep. She planted her AirPods into her ears and nodded.

My stomach swirled, thinking about her. I couldn’t sleep. All I can do is listen for the next time she calls for me.